A few years back, I attended a party in a basement flat on Sycamore Street, one of the grungiest, most addict-infested alleys in the City, in the heart of the Mission District. In subdued clouds of smoke, poets, activists and motley lefties of various races were drinking beers quietly on sunken couches. On the walls hung framed broadsheets by local writers and expressive abstract paintings. The host, a dedicated patron of the arts, had also published chapbooks by local Beat poets and collected works from local painters.

I'd been living in the Mission for more than a decade, but I'd never visited any apartment that so embodied the mythic gestalt of the old neighborhood -- an eclectic artsy, political Left unfettered by bourgeois consumerism. The furniture all looked as if it had been dragged from the drop-off platform at Community Thrift down the street.

Our host was none other than Matt Gonzalez, a young progressive public defender and graduate of Columbia University and the Stanford Law School who had mounted a grassroots campaign against veteran district attorney Terence Hallinan. The party had a slightly melancholy tenor -- the occasion was the post-election day party. Impressively, Gonzalez had gotten about 10 percent of the vote, but he had failed to unseat Hallinan.

The apartment intrigued me. Gonzalez didn't live like any lawyer I'd ever known. Even the radical lawyers I knew displayed telltale signs of their professional status -- a new couch here, a fine wineglass there. But Gonzalez, who lived in a basement unit with multiple roommates, obviously spent his pocket money on things other than shopping sprees at the local Pottery Barn.

That was then; this is now.

Four years later, Gonzalez is president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and one of the top candidates for mayor. Despite his political success, however, some things haven't changed. He's still a renter with three roommates and lives in yet another groover's ghetto -- the Lower Haight/Hayes Valley. He also still supports local artists, hosting monthly art openings at his offices in City Hall.

Wishing to protect the privacy of his roommates, he demurred when I asked to meet him in his current apartment and suggested nearby Kate's Kitchen instead. "It's not that big a deal," he says, shrugging, with his characteristically sleepy-eyed calm. "I mean, if I'm having a party, I'll invite you for a beer, just not as a journalist."

Regardless of his current taste in furniture, one thing is for sure: Gonzalez's experience as an itinerant renter in shared housing more closely resembles that of many of San Francisco's common folk than the housing histories of his fellow mayoral candidates. In the last few years, he's gone through four apartments -- all of them shared with other roommates. During the dot-com era, he moved twice because of owner-move-in evictions -- once from the fabled apartment on Sycamore Street and later in Hayes Valley, where he was living with a friend and his wife, who was then eight months pregnant.

Such experiences as a renter during the housing crisis have suffused Gonzalez's understanding of city politics. When he talks about housing issues, his commentary tends to focus on the plight of low-income residents: the need for rent control in single-resident-occupancy hotels, for instance, or the importance of creating a law that allows tenants to add an additional resident. He's even gone on record saying that he doesn't believe real estate should be a source of speculation -- a pretty revolutionary interpretation of the American Dream.

He knows there's a incredible appetite for more home-ownership opportunities, but he's leery about mainstream solutions: building and condo conversions. "I don't think we're ever going to build our way out of the problem," he says. "Yes, we have to continue to build housing, but the whole mantra of high density along transit corridors has got neighborhoods fearful about what this really means. There's a lot of talk around increased density, but not a lot of corresponding discussion around mitigation of the impact."

When it comes to solving our housing woes, Gonzalez tends to favor radical ventures such as land trusts and limited-equity housing, in which the City subsidizes homeowner units but limits the amount of equity the owners can accrue, thereby preventing them from speculating on their government-subsidized property. In effect, homeowners buy a house, but the City retains ownership of the land so that when homeowners sell, the price is set such that another lower-income person can afford the dwelling.

"The best thing about [the land-trust model] is that the benefits of home ownership are there regardless of the fact that it's limited equity," he explains, adding that Oakland recently started its own land trust.

He also has advocated creating a municipal bank in which the City's funds are held by its own financial institution, rather than employing a private bank that charges the City high service fees and prevents it from investing that money as a bank would. "The possibilities are endless," he says. "One of the things that people would like to see are home-ownership opportunities -- and the municipal bank could help fund such programs."

Critics of these strategies characterize them as unrealistic and largely untested. And, no doubt, without enormous political will, they stand little chance of being implemented. But both ideas offer a radically new way of funding and creating affordable housing. A municipal bank would access new sources of funds through massive savings; the land-trust model would keep public monies benefiting the public rather than being siphoned off into the private sector or into individuals' pockets.

Like most other ultra-progressives, Gonzalez blames the local business community for the City's recent housing crisis. "There were something like 16 jobs for every one unit of housing," he explains. "That's what led to the landlord-tenant wars."

Now that the City is suffering from catastrophically high commercial vacancy rates, he wishes its business leaders and decision makers could learn from their mistakes. "It's the folks who are perceived as pro-business, pro-whatever, who are the ones that led us into this mess," he says. "They're not taking any responsibility for how the economy got to where we're at."

Gonzalez claims it's these same leaders who are now blaming the homeless for their own bad business decisions. "The office buildings are not empty because there are homeless people," he says. "The truth is, hey, we built office space that wasn't sustainable, because [the business] community insisted upon it and the neighbors and progressives fought it and lost -- and now, let's just take a step back and acknowledge that you guys made a mistake."

Likewise, Gonzalez characterizes Newson's Care Not Cash initiative as a grand deception of the voters. "The message was one that no one actually wants to quarrel with: Give people services that they need, instead of cash," he explains. "Hey, sign me up; I'm all for it. The problem is that the amount of money that we're giving the homeless doesn't come anywhere near the amount that we would have to give them to really offer the services. [The homeless] may disappear off the rolls, but we'll still be paying for them at the county hospital and the jails."

Gonzalez's framing of the City's housing crisis follows the old-school lefty line. He regards business explanations with suspicion and believes in the power of good government to create a more ethical and effective world. He's a source of innovative ideas and as, head of the Finance Committee of the Board of Supervisors, received credit even from his opponents for creating a rational city budget.

But Gonzalez still seems strangely resistant to his role as a political leader. Unlike almost all of his fellow mayoral candidates, he has not put his own imprimatur on a "homeless plan" -- or any other plan, for that matter. Newsom has Care not Cash, Susan Leal touts Real Care and Angela Alioto promotes San Francisco Cares, but Gonzalez offers no proposal of his own.

"Everybody's got these plans," he says, finishing his yogurt and granola with a shake of his head. "What nobody wants to fess up to is that the long-term stuff is what works: getting services, building shelters, transitional housing. That's not going to win any votes. What are you going to call it? It doesn't fit into a plan."

When Gonzalez talks like this, he sounds shockingly, well, politically naive. But for many San Franciscans weary about another mayoral race running on the ragged shirttails of the homeless issue, that naïveté may be part of his appeal. He doesn't want to pander to the lowest common denominator, but, in the process, he risks not communicating as clearly as he could. (During this interview, his delivery varied from extremely articulate to rambling; this is not a guy who has well-memorized quips and quotes at the ready.) But, for all his recent political gains, Gonzalez appears to be a politician who hasn't crossed over into the realm where appearances matter at least as much as substance does. With his scorn for well-packaged political rhetoric, I can't help but wonder whether his taste in furniture still runs along the same lines as it did during his Sycamore Street days: the funky-but-functional school of design.

Carol Lloyd is currently at work on a book about Bay Area real estate. She teaches a class on buying your first home in the Bay Area, and another class based on her best-selling career counseling book for creative people, "Creating a Life Worth Living." For more information, email her at surreal@sfgate.com.